How Avito Uses Amplitude to Access and Learn from User Behavior Data

Which category is the most active in our app? This is a simple question but for many teams, it’s harder than it should be to answer. This was the case for Youssef El Ghourfi, the growth manager at Avito, a Morocco-based classifieds marketplace. Avito is part of Schibsted, an international media group with employees in over 30 countries aiming to be a global leader in online marketplaces, growth, and media.

Avito was seeing sustained growth and engagement, but these basic questions about user behavior slowed the growth team down. Even simple questions about their users took 1–2 weeks to answer.

Any product manager or marketer with a question had to send a request to the data team and then wait for queries to be written, data collection, and QA before getting an answer. Youssef thought it should be much simpler—anyone at Avito should be able to look up data and get answers themselves.

As Youssef began looking for the right solution to help his team understand user behavior, he chose Amplitude for the in-depth behavioral analytics, particularly the focus on retention analytics and predictive features like Compass. Making Avito as sticky as possible and retaining users are Youssef’s main goals in his role as growth manager.

This is a story of how the growth team at Avito uses Amplitude to leverage behavioral user data to improve their marketplace.

Easy implementation in just 2 hours

To try out Amplitude, Youssef implemented all of Avito’s events in Amplitude in just 2 hours, saying it was “very straightforward.”

“Since I could implement Amplitude directly into our tag manager, we were able to see it working pretty fast, and I saw the value right away.”

Easy data access means massive time savings

Everyone at Avito, including team members in product, marketing, sales, and design, can now answer their own questions in Amplitude immediately, instead of waiting 1–2 weeks. This shortened time to insight allows for drastically faster product iteration and marketing campaign development, enabling Avito to improve and grow at an accelerated pace.

Who else uses Amplitude at Avito?

MarketingLooks at user engagement data to develop ad copy and decide which user segments to target.

DesignIdentifies which cities or categories are least active to develop ad creatives that target those user segments.

CEOUses custom dashboards to monitor the overall health of the business.

Marketing drove down the cost of acquisition by 3x

The marketing team uses Amplitude data to craft more effective ad campaigns tailored to their best audiences. When it’s time to make new campaigns, they use Amplitude to find the most active categories, cities, and price ranges, and then brainstorm ads to target those users. The resulting ads perform much better than the previous method of doing random tests to see what worked—driving down the cost of acquisition 3-fold.

In addition, the team leverages behavioral data in Amplitude to create custom behavioral cohorts of users who share certain characteristics or behaviors (ex., viewing ads for high-price items like houses and cars). They then route these cohorts to their CRM Appboy, via the integration with Amplitude, to send hyper-targeted push notifications and campaigns to the right people.

Growth & Product identified user actions that boost retention 100%

Avito’s growth and product teams use Amplitude to investigate the user actions that drive retention. For example, they found that if a user did at least one search on their first day, retention increased by nearly 100%. As a result, they updated their onboarding flow to prompt users to make their first search as soon as possible

“We’re 100% focused on pushing users to do these specific actions we’ve identified in Amplitude that make them more likely to stay.”

Anyone can answer any question

For Avito, Amplitude’s value is the ability for anyone at the company to answer any question about their users’ behavior. According to Youssef, “the most powerful thing for me is analyzing retention based on behavior. For some other teams, it’s being able to easily segment events and users based on properties, like finding the most searched keyword in a category. Amplitude is really the perfect data tool.”

Published: 11/23/16

Alicia Shiu

Alicia is a Growth Product Manager at Amplitude, where she works on projects and experiments spanning top of funnel, website optimization, and the new user experience. Prior to Amplitude, she worked on biomedical & neuroscience research (running very different experiments) at Stanford.

Playbook

Master your product's retention

155 pages of actionable strategies for driving retention that you can adapt for any product or industry